A Strategy and Simulation Experience - Coding Contest Smalltalks BA 2009
Abstract: This is an experience report about the development work I have done in Smalltalk for the coding contest of the conference held in Buenos Aires last year. It would cover the motivating problem, the development process and ideas, gaming machinery and some interesting results from the simulation itself.
Besides, I want to talk a little about the overall design, the process and practices I have used, and simulation issues in particular.
The coding contest was a strategy game, where the participants designed and implemented the behavior/strategy for a role-playing character in a fantasy world. The game offers a small set of commands, but the possible strategies are diverse and it is hard to evaluate beforehand if a strategy is good.
Here we will see some design and implementation details of the underlying machinery supporting the game. With these elements at hand we will discuss how the simulation of these reduced fantasy environments is simple but its results can be very complex.
Bio: Carlos E. Ferro works as Senior Developer since 2005 in Caesar Systems, a leading company in the field of business simulation. He works there under Leandro Caniglia's leadership. Previously, he was Smalltalk developer in InfOil (information services for petroleum companies) and Superintendencia de Seguros de la Nación (national insurance oversight board). He has a degree on Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires where he was teaching assistant for 8 years in several courses – mainly Object Oriented Programming with Professor Máximo Prieto and Hernán Wilkinson. From 1991 to 2000 he also worked on his own as application developer for several small and medium-sized companies.